This article explores the origins of and the early challenges faced by the IHI Perinatal Improvement Community, the work to reduce early elective deliveries and rates of cesarean sections, IHI’s overall approach to improvement, and the growing role of the IHI Triple Aim in improving perinatal care.

This initiative demonstrates the utility of a quality improvement (QI) approach in testing, implementing, and subsequent scaling up a national policy for early post-natal care in a resource-constrained setting, and provides a model to accelerate the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals in Ghana and other resource-poor countries.

When the OB nurses at Woman’s Hospital in Baton Rouge noticed full-term births were becoming disturbingly rare, they took action. Their commitment to make a difference eventually helped decrease the hospital's NICU admissions by 23 percent, and informed a statewide birthing initiative that has made Louisiana a leader in perinatal care.

This IHI white paper describes the history, theory of change, design concepts, and outcomes associated with the development and use of bundles — a small set of evidence-based interventions for a defined patient population and care setting — and reflects on learning over the past decade.

This communication tool is given to patients by maternity center staff to help guide educational discussions and to provide a "to do" list of items that need to be completed prior to discharge from the hospital.

July 15, 2010 | New initiatives in some of the poorest parts of the globe are successfully targeting maternal health and delivering healthy prognoses for women and newborns alike. Learn about frontline experiences to improve maternal health in Africa, New York City, and across the US.

April 8, 2010 | Leaders working in the US and internationally to ensure that good quality maternal health is reliably understood and practiced on a wide scale join the program. Learn about accelerating change and implementing processes to reduce misuse, overuse, and underuse of maternity care.

As part of IHI's Collaborative on Improving Perinatal Care, Middlesex Hospital (Middletown, Connecticut, USA) sought to reduce harm in labor and delivery through measures designed to reduce variation in care, and implement interventions for patient-centered care.

Reviews of perinatal care have consistently pointed to failures in communication among the care team and documentation of care as common factors in adverse events that occur in labor and delivery. This white paper provides detail about IHI's Idealized Design process and examines some of the initial work of the Idealized Design of Perinatal Care innovation project.

Many mothers are having perfect babies these days in the Seton Family of Hospitals, thanks in part to a new protocol that has dramatically reduced the number of babies born with traumas or injuries associated with induced births.

Research shows that there is a connection between a pregnant woman's oral health and her child's well-being. To improve access to oral health services for low-income pregnant women and children ages 0 to 5, four community health centers are collaborating to bridge the gap between medical and dental care and to break the cycle of dental disease transmission from mother to child.

A multidisciplinary team of doctors, nurses, and health managers in Ferghana, Uzbekistan, has improved health care for patients with anemia through the introduction of quality improvement process using evidence-based guidelines on anemia, decreasing the incidence rate of women diagnosed with anemia from a mean of 80 percent to 50 percent, and improving the rate of effective treatment of anemia (from mean of 35 percent to 60 percent).

This article describes how a program aimed at reducing elective inductions was successfully implemented and sustained in a large community hospital Swedish Medical Center, a participant in IHI's Improving Perinatal Care Collaborative.

The Perinatal Trigger Tool provides instructions for conducting a retrospective review of patient records using triggers to identify possible adverse events causing any physical harm to the infant or mother.

To help women and their health care providers understand the potential pros and cons of choosing induced labor, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has produced two free, evidence-based research summary guides.